Technobabble

Technobabble is the use of words vaguely related to science fact in some way, in hopes of making speculative fiction at least sound plausible, further assisting the audience in suspension of disbelief. It's also intended not to allow the show or book or whatever to become dated or flawed before it has a chance to make any money. Technobabble has been used extensively in speculative fiction since at least the days of Jules Verne. However, the term, and the terminology behind it, didn't actually hit the mainstream populace until the introduction of Star Trek on modern pop culture.

We have Michael Okuda and his team of people behind-the-scenes at Paramount to thank for a lot of these geeky words. Some of my personal favorite technobabble words from Star Trek include:

In Star Trektechnobabble, an anomaly is the word they use for anything that nobody knows what it is. Any floating thing out in space that is obviously not a starship or a planet or something they actually know about is called an anomaly until the characters can think of a better technobabble word for it. The Crystalline Entity was just an anomaly until they figured out it was an entity made up of crystals. See?